The Importance of Doctors’ and Patients’ Preferences in the Prescription Decision
研究医生和患者的“习惯”如何导致处方药市场份额的持续，发现医生和患者的处方选择存在显著的时间依赖性，这可能导致非价格竞争市场中市场份额的粘性。
This paper studies the contribution of doctor and patient ‘habit’ to persistence in market shares in prescription drug markets. My unique panel dataset allows me to estimate the probability of switching brands as a function of patient and doctor attributes, with an emphasis on past prescribing behaviour so as to capture the degree of persistence. I find significant evidence of time‐dependence in prescription choices for both doctors and patients, which seems to imply that in molecular submarkets in which brands are not allowed to compete on the basis of price, doctor and patient ‘habit’ at the micro‐level can translate into sticky and persistent market shares at the aggregate level.